One Thing I Wish Law Students Knew: Purpose of Education Is Action; Not Just Knowledge

 “In law school you are measured by the answers you write and in a courtroom you are measured by the answers you find”.

This precisely, is one thing I wish to tell the law students. Your marks, the name of your college, the background you come from or your proficiency in English matter far less than you think or imagine when you are in law school, especially if you wish to pursue litigation.

As law students, we spend enormous amount of time worrying about marks, grades, rankings and internships. A few marks less in an examination can start to feel like the heavens are falling. Getting into the “right” law school can sometimes seem even more important, than it actually is.

I do not suggest for a moment that academics are irrelevant. A student should study hard. Get good marks, demonstrate discipline and have a sound understanding of the subject. A good law school can also give you opportunities and exposure, that help you hone your skills as a lawyer. But we must keep in mind that the purpose of education is not just knowledge, it is action.

Especially if you intend to practise as a counsel, particularly in litigation, there comes a point when your marksheet stops speaking for you. You have to speak for yourself, and the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Litigation is truly a great equaliser.

In many professions, the institution from which you graduate can have a significant impact on your first few opportunities. A graduate from a premier engineering or management institute may find doors opening to some of the largest companies in the world.

Take the example of Mr. Sundar Pichai. His academic journey included engineering at IIT Kharagpur, followed by Stanford and Wharton, before his extraordinary professional career eventually took him to the leadership of Google and Alphabet. His educational background was certainly an important part of the opportunities available to him.

Litigation works differently.

Whether you graduated from a National Law University or a relatively unknown law college, whether you stood first in your class or somewhere in the middle, ultimately you can find yourself standing in the same courtroom, before the same judge, arguing the same point of law.

At that moment, nobody asks you what percentage you obtained in your final year.

The judge does not know whether you scored 55 percent or 75 percent. The judge may not even know which law college you attended.

What the judge does know, very quickly, is whether you have read your brief. And arguing a brief well can come only with practice. So I urge to everyone reading this article, to start practicing early. Practice public speaking, practice reading a brief fast in order to grasp the important points of the brief quickly and practice honing your social skills. Because practice is not something that you do when you are good at something, it is what makes you good.

In my little experience, what I have realised is that most matters/ cases do not require excessive research or complicated analysis. What is really required is basic common sense and logic. Most matters/ cases just need to be explained in the most common lucid manner to the Judges presiding in the matter. If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough. This is one thing I have learnt from my Senior.

One must not try to copy someone else in the profession. Off course you may try to look up to someone, admire someone, but one must always be true to who he/ she is. Every individual has his/ her own peculiarities. One must make a virtue of these peculiarities. It is always beneficial in the longer run.

Our Journey in the legal profession will always be distinct from everybody else’s. Some lawyers may come from a legal background, some maybe first generation lawyers. But ultimately, the Courts are great equalisers and here everybody gets the fruits of the efforts that they have put in.

One such example is Dr Milind Sathe, the Advocate General of Maharashtra. He studied in Marathi medium school in Chiplun as a school boy. I am told that he would even cross a river to reach school in his village. Yet none of these hardships prevented him from rising to the very top of the legal profession he went on to become one of the most sought after senior counsels at the Bombay High Court, served as a President of the Bombay bar Association and ultimately became the Advocate General for the State of Maharashtra.

Another example is Senior Advocate Pravin Samdani. His journey is very different from what many law students today imagine as the conventional route to becoming a leading counsel. He studied in a Hindi-medium school, where English was not even a subject. While studying law at K.C. Law College in Mumbai, he was also working as a clerk in a lawyer's office. It was during his law college years that he seriously began learning English.

Think about that for a moment.

A young man who had not received an English-medium education, who worked as a clerk while studying law, and who did not come through the conventional elite academic route went on to become one of the most prominent Senior Advocates practising before the Bombay High Court.

For a young law student who believes that his or her career has already been determined by a law-school entrance examination, college name or marksheet, there can hardly be a more powerful lesson.

Your starting point does not have to determine your finishing point.

Offcourse there are bound to be some failures sometimes. Ups and downs are a part and parcel of life and every profession you choose will have them. But remember, rock bottoms teach you lessons that mountain tops never will!

Each time we must gather ourselves together and start afresh. Surround ourselves with people who encourage us and help us grow, as the people you surround yourselves with have a profound effect on who you become as a person.

After spending more than a decade in practice, I have realised that some qualities matter enormously more than marks in counsel practice.

The first is common sense. Law is ultimately about solving real problems involving real people, businesses and institutions. You may know fifty judgments on a proposition, but if you cannot understand the practical problem before the Court, that knowledge has limited value.

The second is hard work. There is simply no substitute for reading the brief. A well-prepared junior counsel can sometimes assist the Court far better than someone with considerably more experience who has not prepared sufficiently. Courts recognise preparation very quickly.

The third is clarity. In a world full of chaos, clarity is power. A good counsel must be able to take a complicated dispute involving hundreds or thousands of pages and explain the real controversy to the Court in a few sentences.

And the fourth is judgment — knowing what to argue and, equally importantly, what not to argue. Sometimes the best advocacy is not saying everything that can possibly be said. It is identifying the two or three points that actually matter and placing them before the Court with clarity.

It is important to remember that, English is only a medium of communication . It is not a test of intelligence and certainly not a substitute for legal ability. The language can be learned in due course. Not knowing it in the start does not determine your success or failure in the profession.

So what I would tell a law student today is study hard, try to score well, read beyond your syllabus. Take your examinations seriously. But do not allow your marks to define your confidence. And do not believe that merely because somebody studies at a more prestigious law school, speaks better English or has scored higher marks, he or she has already won a race that has barely begun. The success in the profession is the ultimate destination, but nobody really has the map to get there. One must find their own paths and ways to better oneself each day.

Read the brief completely. Know the facts better than anyone else. Find the law yourself. Watch good lawyers argue. Learn how judges think. Develop common sense. Be dependable. Work hard even when nobody is watching.

And learn to explain difficult things in simple language.

Because once you stand up and say, “May it please Your Lordships,” the Court is not interested in where you studied or what marks you obtained.

The Court is interested in just one thing: What do you have to say?